Microsoft Office for Mac 2014 release date, rumours and leaked images

The range of shape tools has been expanded by the introduction of the Merge Shapes function.

Enhanced eyedropper

The eyedropper tool now enables you to capture specific colours, to give to page elements or backgrounds. It's hard to believe this tool hasn't been available before

New Office 2014 for Mac images: PowerPoint

New features in Excel 2014 for Mac

Flash Fill makes it easier to separate out data in the form of text or dates

If you have a column of full names - forenames and surnames - you have imported from another source, perhaps off the Internet, you can extract all the surnames by typing the first surname as an example and clicking Flash Fill. Excel 2013 picks out the corresponding surname from each of the other full names in the list

Quick Analysis lets you preview and add charts or spark lines to a spreadsheet

When you highlight cells in a column of data, an icon appears at the bottom right of the selection. This pulls up a small pane for formatting, charts, totals, tables and sparklines, and hovering the mouse over any of the icon options, previews how the data or chart will look with those options applied

Doing sums

You can perform quick totals, averages and other statistics and draw bar, line and dot charts without ever committing them to your spreadsheet

New Office 2014 for Mac images: Excel

New features in Outlook 2014 for Mac

Outlook 2013 gets a bit of a minimalist redesign, the ribbon is hidden by default and there is little use of colour.

The biggest change Office for Mac 2011 was the move from Entourage to Outlook for email. It is likely that the change from Outlook 2011 to Outlook 2014 will be a little easier to adopt.

Outlook 2013 on Windows integrates email, contacts, schedules and to do lists a bit more smoothly than previously and a new visualization for scheduled tasks has been added.

Of course on the Mac all of these things are synced between iOS 6 and OS X. It would be good if the Office suite could sync up with our standard Mac and iOS apps, but it's unlikely.

Outlook adds support for Outlook.com and Hotmail.com and Skype and Yammer.

New Office 2014 for Mac images: Outlook

What was the latest update to Office for Mac?

The latest major update to Office for Mac 2011, 14.3, came in February 2013 and bought a number of new features, including Retina support and an option for users to jump to the subscription version of Office if they want. It also added built-in support for SkyDrive and SharePoint. At the same time Microsoft launched Office 365, which bought with is a new licensing model for Mac users.